Great character actor supreme Alan Arkin gives a nice, affable, loosey-goosey performance as Rafferty, an uptight, humorless, down on his luck Los Angeles driving instructor who's abducted by a pair of flaky female fugitives: sullen, pouty fifteen-year-old teenage malcontent Frisbee (an abrasively unsentimental, but still appealingly scruffy turn by Mackenzie Phillips) and kooky, frivolous hippie chick and aspiring singer McKinley (a delightfully daffy Sally Kellerman). The gals want Rafferty to drive them to New Orleans. En route to the Big Easy Rafferty loosens up and falls in love with McKinley.
This refreshingly offbeat, enchanting and utterly engaging road movie defies easy categorization. Dick Richards' assured, low-key, keenly perceptive direction makes the most out of the many amusing and beautifully observed minor moments which cohere into a pleasingly quirky whole (the scene where a bar full of folks sing along to the lovely country and western song "You Are My Sunshine" is especially touching and memorable). John Kaye's screwy, episodic and flat-out eclectic script maintains a deftly tricky balance between being funny and serious, thereby providing a handful of delicious seriocomic nuggets out of the most everyday people and situations. Ralph Woolsey's creamy, pictorial cinematography gives the film an eye-catching glossy shine. The three leads are all uniformly terrific; they receive excellent support from Alex Rocco as amicable and lovable Las Vegas sponge Vinnie, Charles Martin Smith as a shy, geeky, ungainly marine, and the always superb Harry Dean Stanton as Billy, a dour, foul-mouthed, one-legged Korean war veteran Frisbee beats in a game of pool. To be honest, this perfectly charming and eccentric little item never amounts to anything more than a flighty piece of insubstantial fluff, but there's a simply intoxicating sunny, loopy and laid-back allure to relished in both the strangely personable true-to-life characters and their rambling cross country misadventures which makes this unjustly overlooked sleeper both highly endearing and immensely entertaining in equal measure.
This refreshingly offbeat, enchanting and utterly engaging road movie defies easy categorization. Dick Richards' assured, low-key, keenly perceptive direction makes the most out of the many amusing and beautifully observed minor moments which cohere into a pleasingly quirky whole (the scene where a bar full of folks sing along to the lovely country and western song "You Are My Sunshine" is especially touching and memorable). John Kaye's screwy, episodic and flat-out eclectic script maintains a deftly tricky balance between being funny and serious, thereby providing a handful of delicious seriocomic nuggets out of the most everyday people and situations. Ralph Woolsey's creamy, pictorial cinematography gives the film an eye-catching glossy shine. The three leads are all uniformly terrific; they receive excellent support from Alex Rocco as amicable and lovable Las Vegas sponge Vinnie, Charles Martin Smith as a shy, geeky, ungainly marine, and the always superb Harry Dean Stanton as Billy, a dour, foul-mouthed, one-legged Korean war veteran Frisbee beats in a game of pool. To be honest, this perfectly charming and eccentric little item never amounts to anything more than a flighty piece of insubstantial fluff, but there's a simply intoxicating sunny, loopy and laid-back allure to relished in both the strangely personable true-to-life characters and their rambling cross country misadventures which makes this unjustly overlooked sleeper both highly endearing and immensely entertaining in equal measure.